Cristina Peri Rossi

Cristina Peri Rossi (born November 12, 1941 in Montevideo) is a Uruguayan-Spanish novelist, poet, essayist, and translator whose work spans more than forty volumes of fiction, verse, and journalism. She received the Cervantes Prize in 2021, the highest honor in Spanish-language letters.

Born to Italian-immigrant parents, she studied biology and literature at the Instituto de Profesores Artigas in Montevideo and taught secondary school while writing. Her first book of stories, Viviendo, appeared in 1963; the surreal novel El libro de mis primos (1969) won the Marcha prize and placed her among the post-boom generation of Latin American writers.

Her open lesbianism, her membership in the leftist Frente Amplio, and the increasingly authoritarian climate in Uruguay made her position untenable. After her books were banned in 1972, she went into exile, settling first briefly in Paris and then in Barcelona, where she still lives. She acquired Spanish citizenship in 1975.

From Spain she produced a steady output of novels and stories, including La nave de los locos (1984) and Solitario de amor (1988), and poetry collections such as Evohé (1971), Diáspora (1976), and Estado de exilio (2003). Her essays on Julio Cortázar, with whom she maintained a long correspondence, were collected in Julio Cortázar y Cris (2014). Earlier honors include the Loewe Poetry Prize in 2008 and the Premio Nacional de Literatura of Uruguay in 2010.

The name Cristina is the Spanish and Italian form of Christina, from the Late Latin Christianus, meaning follower of Christ. She has carried the name through six decades as one of the most translated Uruguayan writers of her generation.